3 Looks To Know From the Rick Owens SS18 Show

Showmanship comes innately to Rick Owens. Yesterday, the American designer wooed his audience once again with an impressive show hosted in the Palais de Tokyo's courtyard. Titled – like his June men's show – "Dirt," it featured fog, a water sculpture, and a soundtrack made of the laughter of his wife, Michèle Lamy. It also featured 40 striking looks.

Photo by Guillaume Roujas for NOWFASHION

Here are our favourite three:

Look 5
Despite the title "Dirt," the most recurrent colour in the collection was immaculate white. Backstage after the show, Owens explained how hope was his inspiration. "I feel I need to propose experimental grace and form as a gesture of turning away from threat. Not really as escapism, but as rejection." Brutalism, futurism, and motherhood were also concepts in his mental moodboard, the latter aesthetically translated through a marsupial-like pouch worn by models around their waists.

Look 14
Owens loves a pop of bright colour in the midst of his mostly black collections. This time, he took to a green that could be described as "petrol," "toad," or, as one journalist put it, "sea monster green." Truth is the designer felt attracted to it precisely because of its ugliness. "I thought it was jarring and irritating and weird because I love colour when it's kind of grotesque," he explained after the show.

Look 39
Towards the end of the show, an eerie procession of sculptural looks took to the catwalk. They looked like random volumes wrapped in layered vests in what was a sort of shibari bondage. But no: as the designer told us backstage, the inspiration behind them was... confectionery. "I saw them as cupcakes, as meringues, icing." There's nothing – not even pastry – that Rick Owens does like the rest of us. And that is precisely the reason why we adore him.